Trump announced his proposal on Tuesday at a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hailed it as “the first good idea that I’ve heard” on how to deal with Gaza, an Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.
But on Thursday, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said he had instructed the military to formulate a plan for the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians from Gaza.
Right to self-determination
“The right to self-determination is a fundamental principle of international law and must be protected by all states, as the International Court of Justice recently underlined afresh,“ he said.
Why is it illegal?
It stipulates that “individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the occupying power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive”.
But with clear limits: “Such evacuations may not involve the displacement of protected persons outside the bounds of the occupied territory except when for material reasons it is impossible to avoid such displacement”.
‘Utter nonsense’
“It’s inciting to commit forced displacement, which is an international crime,“ the independent expert said during a visit to Copenhagen on Wednesday.
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has warned that Trump’s proposal could incite “ethnic cleansing”.
While ethnic cleansing is not recognised as an independent crime under international law, these practices could constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes and may also fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention.
Trump’s proposal makes you “wonder if there is a lawyer at the White House”, Vincent Chetail, an international law professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, told AFP.
Asked about the possible legal consequences of moving ahead with the plan, he stressed the need to distinguish between a forced transfer of people and an occupation.
Forcible transfer is meanwhile “a violation of international humanitarian law and certainly constitutes a war crime”, Chetail said, adding that it could even constitute “a crime against humanity if the entire population was transferred”.
Experts also emphasise that establishing that any departures were actually “voluntary” would be difficult to determine amid Israel’s occupation, which is recognised as illegal by the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ).
If people do opt to leave Gaza en masse, Chetail warned that “it will inevitably be under direct or indirect constraint”.
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